Mobile devices such as smartphones, notebook and laptop computers, PDAs (personal digital assistants), tablet computing devices, and so forth, are extremely prolific, and are extensively used to provide convenient storage and/or printing of various documents and data. Such devices are able to store the documents and data of the user, and allow the user to access such information in many different locations. When users with such mobile devices wish to print documents, files or other information stored on the mobile devices, information is transmitted via a print aware mobile application to a print device directly or through an intermediate processing device using mechanisms such as print.
Printers/multifunction-devices designed for use in a network environment routinely offer greater functionality than a simple desktop printer such as the printer can be managed, monitored, and configured directly from a standard web browser or any web-enabled application. Examples of network connected devices may include scanners, readers, fax machines, label makers, multifunction devices (MFD), or servers. When a user wishes to use one of the networked devices, a connection program may presents the user with a list of all networked devices (such as printers) based on selection criteria provided by the user.
However, there are many situations in which users may not know how to connect to a network of the selected device, such as a wireless network, in order to connect to the device and perform tasks. One issue is that MFDs and mobile devices often reside on different networks. This difference makes a direct connection between MFD and mobile hard to accomplish because this typically requires credentials for accessing that network, not to mention prior knowledge of the configuration parameters required. For example, a user may want to use a multifunction device via their mobile, over an enterprise WiFi network. However, there may be more than one network service set identifiers (SSIDs) visible to the user, and the user may not know which one to use in order to gain access to the selected device. Existing pairing solutions involving the use of NFC hotspots, passive NFC tags, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tags or transmitters and so on are well-known, but do not solve this problem. Instead, such pairing solutions merely solve the problem of identifying the network address (IP or hostname) of the specific device in order to communicate with it, and do not address the problem of how one should connect to the surrounding enterprise network in order to be able to reach that specific device. Moreover, existing solutions introducing surrounding network information (such as which SSID to connect to, and how) would reintroduce administrative overhead in setting up such information, especially as it may change over time. The above problems may be exacerbated for MFDs hard wired to a network and as such do not know the network topology of the network and/or the wireless network information.
As such, a mobile device may only connect to a print device by first connecting to the print device network, which may be different from the mobile device network.
The current disclosure discloses a system and method to automatically determine the correct surrounding network information to use when connecting a mobile device to a network in order to use a resource, such as an MFD with minimal effort.